by Thom Jones
“Hi.”
“What are you playing? What’s that music?”
“Mozart.”
“Mozart? How long since Mozart? Time gallops anymore, even in jail. A year is a day.” She heard him flip his Zippo, click the little carbon wheel and heard the small dull bap of ignition, a small explosion. She could picture the orange and blue flame. Then she heard him click the lighter shut and take a deep drag off a cigarette, exhale, and then fuss with his mouth, picking small strings of dark brown tobacco off his tongue. Bobby smoked straight Gauloises. He said, “Has what’s-huh-name gone? The helper.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” Puff. He really sucked on a cigarette. Really liked to smoke. He said, “Ain’t it frightenin’? All alone for the night?”
“No, this is the best time. Why did you rush off? Why did you leave?”
“I hate to admit it, but whenever I am at liberty, it seems I am ever on the prowl for hard narcotics. When I am thusly focused, Hercules, Gilgamesh, Sir Galahad—none of them boys has got nothin’ on me.” Bobby sucked on his cigarette. He said, “This guy, your gentleman friend, Carl, sounds a bit snakey if ya ask me. I’m truly appalled by the way things have gone funny since I’ve been away. You just can’t trust anyone anymore. Even your square johns are becoming dangerously unpredictable.”
“Oh God! I’m so messed up I can’t think straight,” she said.
“Your best friend runs off with your boyfriend. I would guess you would be messed up. I don’t blame you, darlin’. I thought you said he was married—Carl was married. Tell me about his precious wife?”
“She hasn’t got a clue. She’s just out of it. Doesn’t know a thing.”
“They always know. What do you mean, doesn’t know? They always know. I mean you can’t imagine it because you’re in love with this rattler snake. You are not bein’ objective. You’re blind to the whole deal.”
“I can hear you smoking. Aren’t you supposed to quit smoking when you’ve got diabetes?”
“Yes; it’s one hundred times worse. I cannot drink. I cannot eat so I’m going to smoke, take the narcotic and defile myself in all other ways possible. I am a rebel, you know.”
“The Leader of the Pack,” she said.
He laughed at this and went off on a rap. “Kind sir, your leathers, Levi’s, an’ your motorcycle boots are quite nasty; your tattoos look like Haitian voodoo, your hair is all greasy and that beard is a fright. The very smell of you is revoltin’ and if looks could kill, I do believe I would be dead. Everything is quite in order, we are all of us conformists of one sort or another, but tell me, whyever did you get a foreign-made chopper? How are you going to be a bad ass-kicker on that high-windin’ Japanese piece of shit?”
“You inflicted that refrigerator on me and now you’re Jap bashing!”
“Truly, darlin’, a two-cycle engine is an offense to the human ear. Your Harley-Davidson rumbles in the lower ranges. Whenever I steal a bike for a job, I search out a Harley. They have become utterly dependable in recent years, an’ if you are spotted in the commission of a crime, the heat will fall out on the biker groups, not yours truly.”
She said, “What kind of drugs did you get? I’ve got downers. You could have asked me. I miss you.”
“I called to discuss your heartthrob, Carl. Being a dangerous criminal sociopath has given me insights and advantages in the field of human dynamics. With a complete lack of moral values I have an edge over just any ol’ Tom, Dick, or Harry. I can read deep into the human heart, darlin’. I have a few helpful pointers for ya to consider. I am about to elucidate. But let us first recap the situation: Carl just tells you that he doesn’t like havin’ such a ‘limited’ relationship. Although he will always love you and carry a special place in his heart for you, he can’t bear to lay eyes on you again—”
“And Maizie is in love and I have to listen to her because I’m still dependent on her. I have to listen to her ‘goo goo’ crap. God! I just want to strangle them both. Somebody ought to take that cocksucking bitch out in the bayou and set her on fire.”
“She’s ‘goo goo’ ’cause he took her to heaven.”
“Burn them! I’m serious.”
“I believe you are. Your whole life, you have to be genial and pleasant. From day one you have to be nice, but you aren’t a dependent person really…actually, if you could move around, if you were mobile and could ambulate at high speeds, you would be more like a barracuda. A muncher operatin’ outside the boundaries of conventional morality, wreakin’ havoc and mayhem.”
“You got it. I have to play nice. I’m sick of it.”
“When I came by I was a trifle drug sick and somewhat inattentive to your concerns. Set ’em on fire? Out in the desert? Why, I don’t shock easily, darlin’, but I’m still blushin’ over the phone at those profane words you have spewed out in such a poisonous and vitriolic fashion. Mercy! You had mah ears flamin’. But you don’t let people walk on you. You get it back. I hear what you’re saying.”
“God, Bobby, I’m sorry! I’ve never been like this. I’m so full of hate. I am almost afraid of all the hate and meanness I have inside.”
“Remember that time out in the backyard when I had—I think, I had drunk around the clock and showed up drunk and we drank that whiskey, and then we went and got more? We went down to Shannon’s Tavern together and you kept pissing about how I was going to dump the wheelchair, but I had presence of mind. I wasn’t that drunk. You were pissed. I saw ‘set ’em on fire’ that night.”
She sighed. “That was a great night. A starry summer night. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Alcohol and I’m-in-love LSD. I think about that night all the time. I don’t remember anything about getting pissed.”
“That was ‘Light My Fire’ night. I remember details. That was the night that defined my life. Actions proceeding from that night set me on a course from which there was no turning back. When I was in the joint I used to play Robby Krieger’s guitar riff from the middle of ‘Light My Fire.’ The cut from the Doors’ Double Live Album. When I was in the joint I played it several hundred thousand times on my Walkman and in it discovered the true meanin’ of life. I know all about the thing in itself which exists in all things—this evil thing, this will to live on a planet where all is so blamin’ nasty. Pain is the positive thing, the essential thing. Dear me, I do get carried away—so much for philosophy. You ever see Carlos, or Way-out Willie anymore? Hey, c’mon, baby. Say somethin’. Hello dere? Hello? Hiya…my name Jose Jimenez. He he heh. My name is…Walter, the performing Walrus. Ork! Ork! I’m gonna love ya, baby…all night long. I hope my mustache isn’t too stiff and that you don’t find my breath offensive at close quarters. Hello dere? Excuse me, missy, do you have a breath mint? A bottle of Scope perhaps? I may be a greasy-ass walrus but even I find a steady diet of mackerel and codfish repulsive to the palate. Ork! Hello dere, ladies ’n’ gentlemen. I’m Wally the performin’ Walrus and, gee, hey, isn’t this a great night? Are dey many here among us who feel that life is but a joke? Oh yeah, y’all a bunch a existentialists, ain’tcha?”
“Oh, Robert, cut it out.”
“You didn’t even know ‘Carl’ and we had our laughs. We had good times. He wasn’t even in the picture. This big hurt is going to pass off, believe me.”
“Carlos is in prison,” she said. “Willie…I don’t know.” She heard the Zippo click again and could picture him with the cigarette perched in the center of his mouth. “Yeah, Carlos is in the slammer and Way-out Willie took a powder.”
Bobby said, “Is that so? I figured them to be dead by now. They have exceeded my most extravagant expectations.”
She took a sip from her bedside wineglass, popped down a couple Dramamine along with four Stelazine tablets. Robin’s-egg-blue pills chased with more wine. She thought of Carl. Carl was a square, there was no denying.
Bobby said, “You’re at that point where you don’t think you can get over it again. You can do it once, twice, three times and then you lose
the stomach for it. Does that make any sense?”
“I don’t know—” she said. “I don’t know if I can make it anymore.”
“To give someone trust or credibility, you listen to them and then buy into what they tell you. When you know what they say is true, insightful, and that it feels right, over a period of time—as you come to know them, when they become your friend, you take on faith whatever else they may be pushing. As a criminal psychopath I learned that this is a vital, an essential truth. In the beginning what you had with Carl was really all on the level. Then they start lying and you believe them because you need to believe. That’s why suckers buy snake oil, baby. That’s why life is so damn tricky. It’s the reason people get paranoid. They’ve got good reason. If that was his picture in your room, the man is involved in real estate. Razor bumps and halitosis. White on white tie. Diamond rings on his pinky finger. Why, I can scarcely bear to picture such a gross and horrible presentation of vulgarity. How could ya fall for a straight john like that? A pigeon like that? Well, that is water over the bridge. He’s your boy. Then suddenly—whoa! This other passion is cooking for Maizie. Come to think of it he’s having fantasies about her for a time and vice versa—subliminal, can you dig? Until there is some event where the two of them are alone together, one thing leads to another and they are both fuckin’. Let’s not call it ‘making love,’ let’s call it what it was, all right? Fuckin’. Probably did it in the missionary style the first time. That’s how it usually goes, no improvisations or anything too darin’. All that exotic fuckin’—all of that comes later. Anyhow, he means no harm up to a point and then he has a choice to make. They’re probably surprised to know you got hurt feelings! I mean they are so much into themselves.”
She finished off her glass of wine and felt it warm her, it was a subject she was sick of, yet obsessed with, and this was another perspective. Nice of Bobby to try and cheer her up, but she was just so sick of it…all.
Bobby continued. “I mean, he’s probably got an old condom in his wallet. Just in case. They commit the intimacy. Maybe precede it with some fellatio and cunnilingus. They are really feeling ‘up’ because they are doing something clandestine—naughty, sneaky. What a thrill! I mean now he’s cheating at least two ways and this is really exciting. Are you feeling angry?”
“That,” she said, “but more objective than usual. Disgusted.”
“Fucking like a couple of dogs in heat. Get out a hose. You know, everybody does it, but they don’t want the world to see it. And the reason they don’t want the world to see it is because love manifested on this vibration is of a low order. It really isn’t love, it’s just lust, one of the cardinal vices in the Buddhist scheme. Don’t you just envy them?”
“God, no! What are the other…cardinal vices?”
“Anger, avarice, and indolence. The cardinal virtues bein’ chastity, generosity, gentleness, and humility. Plato’s celebrated virtues would be justice—”
“Valor, temperance, and wisdom.”
“Very good. I thought propriety was in there but you may be right. The prison library is rather inadequate. That’s neither here nor there. Carl and Maizie. Together they feel as one. This is rapture in the back seat of a car. You feel like you’re missing out on something? Smellin’ kinda funky in that back seat.”
“What are the Christian virtues?”
“What is this? You tell me.”
“Faith, love, hope—”
“I’m not a Christian, but it seems to me that if you can have sympathy for another human being, the walls break down.”
She took a deep breath and swallowed hot salty tears. “He took her to heaven. And you’re right, she acts like she is in heaven, remember? Don’t try to give me aversion therapy—‘it stinks in the back seat.’ ”
“You say you wanna set them on fire out in the desert—that’s the downside of all this shit. Part and parcel. That’s all I’m saying. Think of them like dogs in heat, it’s easier that way. And never, but never, get involved with a married man.”
“My options are very limited,” she said. “I always imagined being carried away by the passion. Swept up in kisses. You’re wrecking the whole deal for me.”
“This is not Gone With the Wind. This is a couple of dogs in heat. These two are bad. Give me the match. Has Carl got kids?”
“Three.”
“That’s splashing bad karma all over the place. Poor Carl, he needs this and he needs that. Fucks his kids, fucks his wife, fucks you—he’s a sorry motherfucker. And you feel guilty crapping around with a married guy, right? Why would you mess around with a married man? You are not without blame, here. I get caught boosting and I do my time. I know the rules.”
“You’re right,” she said absently. “He always needs this and that.”
“And he didn’t have the balls to come right out with it. He’s doing it incrementally. I could go over there now and shoot him right between the eyes if you have an aversion to flame. He won’t know what hit him. Where does he live?”
“I’d like that. In a way I’d like that, but—”
“You’re a barracuda. I’m not lying. Little Anthony and the Imperials. ‘Tears on my pillow, pain in my heart; that ain’t you. The female Steven Seagal, I’m not lyin’. Where does he live? I’ll get him tonight. I got my ball point and paper ready and I’m in possession of untraceable firearms.”
“No, Bobby,” she said wearily. “It wasn’t nothin’ no more than an everyday two-timin’. I jes’ been down, I guess. Robert, it’s so good to hear your voice. It doesn’t seem like four years, it seems like yesterday.”
“They were troubles yesterday. We always got troubles. Walk around on this planet and you’re gonna have troubles. Only the mind does amazing things. It forgets the pain. You see pictures of people in the death camp—some guy points a camera at them and they smile, or somebody shows you a picture of Johnny and he’s smiling and somebody says, ‘Yeah, we took that photograph four days before he blew his head off with the twelve-gauge.’ Life is tricky that way. Fools you. I could do it, you know. I could blow my head off. Once you make your mind up to end it, they say you feel incredibly peaceful and infinitely wise.”
“When Johnny gets on the other side. What happens?”
“Nothing.”
“You say ‘nothing.’ Like before you were born?”
“Just like that.”
“What if Johnny gets over to the other side and finds himself in a pile of shit. A pile of shit he can’t get out of?”
“No, baby, this is it. What you see is what you get. You get this. So anyhow, Johnny with his twelve-gauge. Maybe somebody says a certain thing and he don’t take out the shotgun but three years later gets cancer of the pancreas. Don’t have the nerve to die now. Don’t got the balls for it anymore. Suffers excruciating pain. Termites eatin’ outcher insides. Ya know? Johnny should have shot himself then. The part of him that can see in the future told him then. I’m not saying you should always follow your heart, but these unconscious drives are probably more correct than we will ever know.”
She took the heavy receiver and shifted it to her other ear, cradling it against her shoulder. Poised on the edge of her bed, she reached over with her right hand and poured herself another glass of wine. She opened the drawer of her night table and pulled out the rest of her stash. She couldn’t believe what she was doing. The plan. Her grand inspiration was fast becoming a reality. She never thought she could pull it off but she was doing it, taking charge.
“I could never shoot myself,” she said.
“It’s the fastest way out,” he said.
The Dramamine had hit her fast behind all that wine. She picked up four more Stelazine tablets and swallowed those with more wine. Like Dramamine, Stelazine had an antinausea effect; it would keep her from puking. Plus, it could really make you blotto. She looked at her pills: her cache of Librium, glossy black and green capsules—five hundred or more; Valiums in blue; Xanax all pearly white; red and gray Darvo
ns; Ludiomils in good-morning-sunshine orange; tricolored Tuinal in red, redder, and baby blue; drab brown Triavil in the 4-10 proportion; there were pastel orange methadone diskets (just two); some chalk white meprobamate in the generic—wipe-you-out-for-sure; multicolored Dexedrine spansules, passionate purple Parnate; there were her Nembutals, and the sea green, let’s-do-the-job-up-right Placidyl gel caps (Baby Dills)—the pills and capsules suddenly became an object of immense beauty, a treasure. It was better than unearthing a pirate captain’s sea chest filled with glittering gold doubloons, shimmering jewels: emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and chips of anthracite coal—better because pills did things. Drugs altered sensations. They could alter the worst sensation—permanently. They would do so…presently. All you had to do was swallow. What a relief to commit. To finally end it. She felt the richness and depth of color of the pills down to the roots of her hair. Pills so beautiful they made her hurt down to the roots of her hair.
Maybe it was the wine. No, really, it was the pills hitting home. Taken with wine on an empty stomach, they probably dissolved in seconds. She would have to make fast work of the cache and after she asked him what his plans were, she began swallowing the various pills and capsules with wine, ten at a time. It was like working on an assembly line and her hand began to tire. She got down thirty and had to rest a moment. She poured another glass of wine and was quickly back at it. This was her job. Her last job.
She heard the Zippo go off again. He was smoking. Thinking. There was too much of a dead space. He didn’t know what to say. He was trying to psych her up and was out of gas himself. He didn’t realize that he had made the final act possible. She was proud of herself. Your friends do sometimes come through. “Isn’t that some bad shit at the refugee camp in Zaire?” she said merrily. She grabbed at the pills as the colors suited her mood.
“Yeah, bad. But if I’m laying in the gutter shitting and puking my guts out—and I have laid in gutters and done that, baby. Nobody comes along—no foreigner comes along with an IV tube to save my black ass. I ain’t even expecting it.”